I lately upgraded my gaming rig from the pretty old (5+ years) i7-2700k to a i7-8700k and I thought: Hey, why not also get one of those nice and shiny M.2 NVMe SSDs.

But there, the problems starts. Since I use DiskCryptor (DC) for Full-Disk-Encryption (FDE) I figured, that these little beasts need to run in UEFI mode and DC only supports MBR/Legacy Boot. So had to walk the hard way and find a new encryption software which works in UEFI mode. I finally came to the conclusion, that VeraCrypt (VC) might be the best way to go. So I installed VC and it looked pretty promising. The good points about VC are

Open source

Actively developed

UEFI/NVMe support

Security audits on the implementation

while DiskCryptor lacks all the points except for the first one. So migrating to VeraCrypt might be the right decision, right?

So I installed VC but now the problems for my planned system configuration started. In UEFI mode, Windows creates 3 additional partitions (“System”/UEFI, Recovery, MSR) among the real windows partition, where all three can’t be encrypted. That wasn’t much of a big issue to me (they anyway just handle the boot process) until I found out that any further encrypted partition will not be mounted pre-boot but rather when Windows is already up and running via a method called System favourite volume. This was totally unacceptable for me because upon installation, I generally move the whole user-folder via audit-mode to a secondary partition, which now does not work anymore (same is true for swap-file). But then I fortunately found a YouTube video by the user Yven B where he claims, that booting in legacy mode from an Samsung 960 EVO NVMe SSD works. I knew about the fact, that the 950 Pro series works that way but all further info I found claimed, that almost all NVMe SSDs on the market (including the 960) indeed do not support legacy boot. So I can only imagine that Samsung either flashed a new ROM to their 960 EVO which allows legacy boot or my motherboard (Asrock Z370 Fatal1ty K6 Gaming) somehow has a trick to make this work. Eitherway, I’m happy

Long story short: One can boot a Samsung 960 EVO NVMe M.2 SSDs on an Asrock Z370 Fatal1ty K6 Gaming motherboard in “legacy”/BIOS mode.

To be honest, the adaptations of CS1.6 to CS:S to CS:GO became worse and worse. But on CS:GO it became a complete disaster. In-game purchases, unlockables, ranks: Nothing the real CS ever was about.

Anyway, I bought this game a few years ago on a LAN party and I enjoyed a few public games there with my friends. Now, my friends are playing it way more than our previous we play together-games such as Battlefield or Starcraft so I simply also began to play it again.

But here it becomes tricky: Before I can play on a non-cheating infested or full of noobs-team public server with my friends (a.k.a competitive mode) I need to become level 3. Yeah, this was a hard run, since you only can rank up very slowly in public-games but I managed this.

But then there was a new border I had to cross: I need to win 10 competitive games in order to be competitively ranked and be able to play with my friends. So I did that. But now the new major bummer: I’m only allowed to win two matches a day. WTF?

My friends told me it’s all about getting cheaters from coming back to competitive again easily. But to be honest: A cheater simply can wait this time and doesn’t care. He will play a few games with his cheat everyday and after five days, he is back in. But for a normal player like me, I’m getting stones put in my way. Counter-Strike as it is with CS:GO is dead to me, even though I would like to play it.

In the past few months I was playing Battlefield 4 and I have to say, it is the most disappointing yet addictive (FPS) game I have ever played besides BF3. So what is cool and what is totally wrong you ask? Well, lets start with the good things. It is a massively complex FPS with four player-classes with a variety of diferent loadouts (guns, gadgets etc). Furthermore it offers vehicles – A lot of them. And everything is very well implemented and more or less polished if you look at the sole vehicle class.

Now lets talk about the bad things. And there are more than the good things – yet it can be easily fixed/balanced but EA DICE doesn’t give a shit about it.

The most annoying bugs/issues are the following ones:

Client Crashes (have been dramatically reduced since the release, but yet happening)

Server Crashes (also reduces but yet happening a lot. All your progress/unlocks will be lost after a crash)

Unable to join servers via Battlelog. A lot of times, balltelog starts the game but it won’t connect because the server was full in the first place.

But yet ingame there is a lot more wrong, mainly because of bad decisions in means of “money saving”.

The game lags – A LOT. You die behind walls 500ms after you moved there or the enemy shoots you with 1 shot (on your perspective) but yet he shot you more times. This is mainly because of…

… the totally bad netcode. It sucks. No other description

Further more, servers run at a network-tickrate of 10 Hz! Yet they calculate new game-states at 30 Hz. WHY? So servers causes (more but still very moderate) CPU load but clients don’t get a new update of the game-state which causes lag?

And there are many many more. Yet the networking/lag/netcode issues are most annoying because they destroy all the fun. And just because EA DICE and the gameserver hosting companies want to save traffice/cpu-load/money. Yet the game and server-rents costs a so much money that renting a dedicated root server for the same price will give you 100 the performance than a crappy hosted BF4 server which is shared with 99 other people.

Lately it was time again to replace my old mid-range PC by a faster one. The old contains a Intel Core i5-750 on an Asus P7P55D board combined with 4 GB DDR 1333 Ram , a HD4890, 128 GB Vertex 2 SSD and 2 TB Seagate Barracude 7200.10 drive.

The new one now offers the best hardware which was yet not too expensive: Intel Core i7-2700K on a Asus P8z68-V/Gen3 paired with 8 GB DDR3 1600 and a HD6970. For storage I chose a Samsung MZ-7PC128D 128 GB SSD and a Seagate Green Barracude (5900/min) with 2 TB of space.

All single components (except for the 2 TB drive) already have around twice the performance of the old one.

So I might be able to play all the games I bought lately on full details, yay (CoD MW3, Serious Sam 3: BFE, Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Saints Row the Third,…

Edit: Just overclocked my CPU to 4.5 GHz for all cores. That’s 1 GHz more without turbo-mode and 900 MHz more with maximum TurboMode Clock for all cores simultaneously.. No Vcc increase was necessary and performance increased by more than 30% (as the power consumption did simultaneously). To my knowledge, the i7-2700k is capable of around 5 GHz and more but my cooling is not that sufficient anymore (EKL Alpenföhn Himilaya)

Edit:

This rig is AWESOME! Seriously. The CPU runs generally at 3.5 GH. With turbo boost it OCs one Core to 3.9 GHz, two to 3.8 GHz, three to 3.7 GHz and four to 3.6 GHz. Now it runs at 4.5 GHz for all four cores simultaneously without any performance or heat issues (+ 1 GHz to nominal clock). And I know it is capable of an OC to 5.4 GHz (water cooling is necessary beyond 5 GHz). I speak out my respect to Intel and their genious CPUs. I’ve never been that capable of OC with any AMD CPU I ever owned.

The disk encryption tool DiskCryptor is my favorite tool when it comes to full-disk encryption of a system. The benefits (over e.g. TrueCrypt) are good performance on SSDs, hardware acceleration of AES and Serpent algorithm, fully licensed under GPL and other cool things.

Converted the project to Microsoft Visual Studio 10 format & fixed some compile properties like Output paths, which got somehow messed up during conversion (Compiling the driver on x86 still does not work, but the solution is simple.)

Modified include/boot/e820.h on line 4: #define E820MAX 128 /* number of entries in E820MAP */

Modified include/version.h to show version to 1.0.735.112 (Last one is the version of the bootloader)

Compiled the whole project

Copied signed drivers and debugfiles (pdb) of the original DiskCryptor 1.0.735.111 over my compiled files

Made an (unsigned) installer

I tested the program on my laptop (Windows 7 x64) successfully with full system encryption, but I’m not sure if the fix works since I have no machine (yet, that’s why I compiled it) where the error appears.

BE AWARE THAT I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY PROBLEMS OR DATALOSS AND I CAN’T GUARANTEE FOR THE FIX TO WORK.

The original author has fixed this issue in 1.0.802.118 and later. Please use his version instead: diskcryptor.net

As you might have noticed, the old server has been down now for more than one week.
There are multiple technical reasons for that so stealthrider and me have decided to finally get our own server. (The last one was shared with 1½ more persons).

So expect most of the services to run in the near future again.

Server specs:

CPU: Core i7-930 @ 2.8 GHz (8 Hyperthreads)

RAM: 24 GB

HDD: 2 TB

Network: 100 MBit/s to the internet, 1 GBit/s in same datacenter

Those specs are split to two distinct virtualized servers:

Windows Server (Main services like gameservers)

CPU: 6 cores

RAM: 16 GB

HDD: 1.5 TB

Linux (HTTP, SVN,TS3)

CPU: 2 cores

RAM: 6.8 GB

HDD: 500 GB

Both vhosts are already up and running but not fully configured yet. Especially SVN. Backups of the old (SVN) data exist so once everything works again, you should not need to delete your old SVN repository and recheckout. HTTP and SVN should work again. Have fun!

About a few months ago (4-6), an update added something terrible to the steam-community overlay: Sometimes in some games (for me mostly L4D2 and CS:S), the game lags when you press or hold the SHIFT key. I first linked it to the source-engine but then found out that the Community-Overlay is causing it. Since I use the SHIFT-Key for jumping, I was now unable to play games properly with those lags so I wrote a program to fix it (Requires MSVC Restributables 2010 32-bit and runs invisible in background after startup. Kills Overlay when pressing CTRL+TAB)

So far, I found out the following helps to fix the problem:

Do not use the SHIFT-Key (doh)

Disable the Community-Overlay (you’ll lose comfort obviously)

Kill the Community-Overlay (up to several times)

And this doesn’t help:

Rebind the Community-Overlay shortcut to something else which doesn’t use SHIFT

So if you encounter the same, just use my program and do the following when it happens:

Open the Community-Overlay

Kill it by pressing CTRL+TAB (hold it up to a second)

Press escape (your mouse is stuck, pressing escape fixes it)

If it still lags, do this procedure again

And for those, who dont trust my program: Here is the source-code, so you can compile it yourself. Code is public-domain (replace the #include’s “…” with < and > – Worpress didn’t allow me posting it with the < and >)

I really like CoD: Black Ops lately (but not as much as Modern Warfare 2) and especially the Hard Core mode (HC), where one hit can kill you and don’t get a kill cam. But HC also annoys me since you get kicked if you do too much TKs. You might think now “Hey, TKs are bad MHHKay” but only if you do them intentionally. I generally do a few TKs accidentally by Napalm or an RC-XD but sadly they only accumulate and a TK never vanish. So if you do some TKs up to minus one to the kick threshold at the beginning of a round and then play perfectly fine until the end, you still will be kicked for one more TK there. This annoys me as hell because TKs happen. But the TKs from the beginning have nothing to dowith the last one at the end of the round and still you will be kicked and lose all your experience points and therefore level-ups (levelling up in shooters are anyway stupid).

So my suggestion for CoD: BO is making TKs vanish over a timespan of let’s say 1 kill per minute and only count multiple TKs at once (by e.g. a napalm strike or a frag grenade) only one time.

The official Android 2.2 (FroYo) update has been pushed out by HTC last weekend for unbranded phones. Sadly I do own an Orange.Fr branded HTC Desire (which I bought over eBay) so the update couldn’t be installed onto my phone. Since I didn’t want to wait for ages until Orange.Fr pushes out their branded FroYo (which btw is awefully branded) in twenty weeks or so, I rooted my phone and installed the latest update manually. Here is how I did it.

First of all, this tutorial does not work (so far) for HTC Desire phones, which got already updated by the OTA (over-the-air) update from HTC, since it altered the bootloader heavily.

ATTENTION: Even if it’s most unlikely that you damage your phone with the following steps, I do not take any responsibilities for possible issues. Be also warned that performing the below steps will void your warranty!

WARNING: All installed apps will be gone after the update (doesn not count for rooting). So save them e.g. with appSaver (available in the market). You should also make a SD-Card backup (just to be sure).

Rooting the phone:

Rooting the HTC Desire is quite easy and you just have to fit the prerequisites.

Un-Install HTC Sync (we just need the drivers). Do not leave HTC Sync installed. Otherwise rooting will not work.

Shutdown your phone and press the power-on key while holding the volume-down key. You should see “HBOOT” in the menu now. If not, scroll down to HBOOT by using the volume-keys and select it with the power-on key.

If the bootloader shows you any version higher than 0.93.1 the following steps will not work.

reflash.exe should now detect your phone and do everything neccessary automatically. Your phone will restart a few times.

Once done, your phone should be rooted after around 1-2 minutes. There should also be a Superuser Permissions app installed.

Creating a backup of the currently installed Android OS

Before you install FroYo you need the app Rom Manager from the market.

Run Rom Manager and select Clockwork Mod Recovery installation.

Once done, select Restart into Recovery System.

The device should restart itselt into a green menu (also available by using the volume-down/power-on combo and selecting recovery from the bootloader)

Scroll down to nandroid with the volume-keys and select it by pressing the optical trackball.

Select Backup. This will copy the current ROM and every settings onto your SD-Card, so you can write it back later if anything went wrong or you have to restore the original ROM (it will be stored in /sdcard/nandroid/backups so you better don’t delete that folder!)

Restart your phone.

If anything goes wrong in the following steps, you can get back to the previous Android version again by performing the above steps but selecting Restore instead of Backup.